REEEC Receives Competitive State Department Title VIII GrantThe Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at Illinois is pleased to announce that it recently was awarded a $225,000 grant from the State Department’s Program for the Study of Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (Title VIII). The grant provides support for REEEC’s innovative Summer Research Laboratory, and will provide...[more]

Slavic Story Time at the Urbana Public LibraryWhat could be better than cozying up at the library to hear a Slavic folktale? On September 16th, 2017, Stephanie Chung, Outreach Coordinator of REEEC, and Nadia Hoppe, PhD student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, hosted Slavic Story Time at the Urbana Public Library. Chung read the Russian folktale “Alenoushka and Her Brother,” a story about...[more]

History Now!: Reflections on “Living Through” the Russian Revolution in The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927)by Rachel Thompson (Undergraduate History major)As I was making my way to the Friday night film screening of TheFall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), I thought to myself, “Wait, what is the Romanov Dynasty? Why did it fall? What is this film even going to be like?” I was attending this event, part of the“1917: Ten Days that Shook The World / 2017: Ten Days that Shake the Campus”series, as a requirement for a course I am enrolled in called History Now!...[more]

Bagpipes, Shawms, and Songs About Knights: Stary Olsa at the Illini Unionby Sydney Lazarus (MA Student in REEES)On a recent Thursday night at the Illini Union, some eighty people were clapping their hands to a drinking song as the six musicians onstage took swigs from a silver mug in between performing. This is perhaps not an unusual occurrence on a college campus, except the drinking song dated back to the Middle Ages...[more]

Please notify REEEC with any recent lectures, conferences, papers, articles, books or other news and it will be included in the next Newsletter! Simply fill out the linked form - Share your News with us, available through the Center eNews.

Library Exhibition on 1917How do you commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution when your library hosts one of the preeminent Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Collections in the U.S.? The University of Illinois’ world famous Slavic Reference drew from the amazing collections housed at the University of Illinois Library to create unique exhibit commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The exhibit, which opened on September 1st, includes...[more]

Revolution and Renewal: a Review of the Revolutionary Poetry Slamby Jesse Mikhail Wesso (MA Student in REEES)It was grey and hot and the air was heavy with an electric presence, the humid harbinger of a storm we first sense with our noses. I parked my ‘96 Oldsmobile outside of the Channing-Murray building in Urbana just as the first mists of this late summer rain began...[more]

Revolutionary Film series: The Fall of the Romanov Dynastyby Felix Cowan (PhD Student in History)As part of the University of Illinois’s “1917: Ten Days That Shook the World / 2017: en Days that Shake the Campus” program series, a group of dedicated students and film buffs gathered in the Armory on September 29 to watch Esfir Shub’s pioneering 1927 Soviet documentary, The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Padenie dinastii Romanovykh). Commissioned and produced for the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution...[more]

REPOST: Article Written: 1917 for 2017by Kristin Romberg (Assistant Professor, Art History)When the editors of NewsNet asked me months ago to contribute something on the current state of scholarship about art produced in the context of the Russian Revolution, I planned to write about the repositioning of the field in the past ten years...[more]

REPOST: The Russian Revolution from Behind Barsby Andy Bruno (Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University) and Mark D. Steinberg (Professor of History at UIUC) As scholars, we sometimes ask ourselves whether what we study and teach matters outside the walls of academia. When the public thinks at all about the meaning of the Russian Revolution at its centenary, judging by scattered op-ed pieces and reviews of some of the new books on the subject, the assessments have mostly returned to familiar, and mostly negative, arguments about ..[more]

For events associated with 1917: Ten days that shook the world / 2017: Ten days that shake the campus please visit the calendar for the event series.For a full calendar of events see ourREEEC Master Calendar